§ 78. We find an unusual variety of terms,[67] all transferred from other combinations, to express the clubs or unions of students among themselves, and they are constantly mentioned in books and inscriptions of the second and third centuries A.D. They naturally grew out of the old separation of the ephebi into a separate class long before university education was organized, or rather crystallized, into the shape we are now discussing. The presidents of these clubs were called _choregi_ (also κορυφαῖοι and ἀκρωμῖται). Inscriptions tell us of similar private combinations among the ephebi in the second century A.D., in which names from the general lists are repeated under the separate heads of _Heracleids_ and _Theseids_, two associations to be compared with the students’ clubs at the Italian and German universities, which often bear the names of nations, thus pointing to their mediæval origin. There is evidence of some peculiar importance, possibly of rivalry, as regards the Theseids and Heracleids at Athens, and the German critics are probably right in suspecting a political bias to have been the true ground of difference. The constant relations of Heracles and Theseus in the legends and the religion of Attica are well known; the Temple of Theseus, still standing at Athens, is by many considered a Heracleion, and the deeds of Heracles are more conspicuously celebrated than those of Theseus in its sculptured reliefs. Theseus was certainly raised by Attic legends into the position of founder of the democracy, and the ideal of an ephebus, and as such he may have been contrasted to Heracles, who was the ancestor of Doric nobility, and might be regarded as of aristocratic tendency. This conjecture has the merit of probability, though it has no basis beyond these general grounds.